"Yun Er is truly clever," paused An Jing before suggesting, "How about you four recite this poem for father and mother to hear?"
"Okay!" All four little ones nodded their heads.
Then, without needing An Jing and Xiao Changyi to urge them, they began reciting together, "Before the bed..."
Their voices were still childish, and they recited the poem quite neatly. All four little ones were very serious about their recitation, each wearing expressions that begged for praise after they had finished. Watching this, An Jing and Xiao Changyi found it amusing yet were tenderhearted.
As soon as they finished reciting, the four children looked at them, their meaning quite clear: Daddy and Mommy, please praise us quickly!
An Jing immediately satisfied them with verbal praise, "Oh wow, my children are so clever, to be able to recite poems at such a young age."
Xiao Changyi’s cool eyes were warm and tender, he said nothing, but he lifted his hand and touched each of the four little ones’ heads.
Praised by their mother and patted on the head by their father, the four little ones were extremely happy, crawling towards An Jing and then towards Xiao Changyi, back and forth, creating a joyful atmosphere.
An Jing and Xiao Changyi, watching the children , were also quite happy.
"Husband, should we start teaching Jing’er and the others some characters? Recognizing a few simple ones wouldn’t hurt, right?" Suddenly, An Jing said. "After all, they play every day, so recognizing some characters would be good."
Xiao Changyi nodded, "Hmm."
"Let’s start by teaching them a few on our own, and for the rest, we’ll invite the mister to our home to teach them when the time comes."
"When the children turn four, we’ll invite the mister to our home. I was originally planning on sending them to school, but I think four is a bit young, let’s send them when they turn six instead; that way, we can be more at ease."
"Now the children are only two years and four months old, we have over a year before they turn four, and even if we can’t teach them much during this year, teaching them to simply recognize some characters is still doable."
"All the characters here are traditional, and there’s no pinyin, so it’s indeed a bit difficult to learn..." As she spoke, An Jing began to ponder.
There is no phonetic alphabet here; instead, they use direct sound or fanqie methods for phonetic annotation, both of which are inconvenient.
Fortunately, the pronunciation of the characters here is similar to Mandarin...
Thinking this, An Jing, with eyes shining, said: "Husband, what if I annotated all the characters here with pinyin? Then when it’s time for our children to learn, wouldn’t it be much easier?"
"Hmm. Consider it as using symbols, using some symbols for phonetic annotation. For example, for ’阿,’ use the symbol ’a’ for the first tone." While saying this, An Jing pulled over Xiao Changyi’s hand and wrote an ’a’ in the palm of his hand.
In reality, An Jing wanted to mention the alphabet, but there were no alphabets here, and she was afraid that Xiao Changyi might not understand, so she referred to them as symbols instead.
Xiao Changyi felt the ’a’ symbol An Jing drew in his palm, yet remained silent.
An Jing continued, "Pinyin consists of 26 symbols, and different combinations of these symbols represent different sounds. For instance, ’巴’ could be represented using these two symbols."
As she spoke, An Jing wrote the letters ’ba’ in Xiao Changyi’s palm. Then, she added, "Also for the first tone."